Examples Of What's Possible With A Highly Trained Sense Of Touch

and how it supports wellness via bodywork

Apr 20, 2025

When I enrolled in my first craniosacral therapy class back in January 2022 [1], a particular demo stuck with me. The teacher asked the room - who here is in active pain?

About 10 people in the lecture hall raised their hands, and the teacher picked someone with 4/10 back pain. He had her lie on the massage table at the front of the room, and he slid his hands under her back. To untrained observers it seemed like he wasn’t moving his hands, but when she climbed off the table 15 minutes later, she reported that her back pain was now at a 1. Also, her range of motion along three different tests of hip mobility had increased by a factor of 2. [2]

To unpack this a bit more - I’ve studied bodywork for three years since that demo, and I now know that it looked like he “wasn’t moving his hands,” but actually he was tracing micromovements of fascia and bone, with variances of 5 grams of pressure and motion about 16ths of an inch. I do something very similar in my practice today!

I ultimately didn’t stay in that line of training, partly because it wasn’t a good fit for my learning style, but also because my sensory acuity and tactile sensitivity were being drawn in the direction that would most help resolve the challenges I was facing in my own body. (Namely: enabling fascia self-organization to help me recover from my right abdominal fascia being rubberized in a second grade car crash, and also a particular kind of nervous system refill and rejuvenation that I needed after a decade of nonstop high-achievement tanked my body’s reserves and left me constantly borderline-ill.)

Because, wow, turns out there’s so many directions to hone tactile sensitivity in. So much signal can come through our sense of touch!

Tactile sensitivity is trainable

For the record, when I first started learning to wayfind via my sense of touch, I was confused and hesitant. I was used to picking up math concepts quickly! But here, teachers were discussing the symmetry, quality, amplitude, and rhythm of the motion of the cerebrospinal fluid through the frontal and parietal bones of the skull, and how they could be used to identify contractures in the fascia inside the skull. And I heard all the words - but when I tried out feeling for them on my class partner, I got no signal. I felt hair and skin, and the bony outline of the skull, and muscle tension, and the bones of my own fingers, and something else that I’d later discover was lines of pull in fascia.

So, I didn’t pick their sensory bandwidth up instantly - and it’s still a bit oblique to me, because I’ve been training attunement to fascia instead. But that doesn’t mean I’ll never feel it. I expect it to come online as I keep training.

If you’re interested in learning more about what training tactile sensitivity looks like, I teach it sometimes! You can read more of that here; here’s an excerpt.

I used to think, before I learned bodywork, that what I felt in the world or someone’s body at any given time, was all that there was to feel. Now I know that’s just laughably not true. Now I feel intricate interconnections of fascia, and various bodily pulsing cues, and I can basically echolocate to stuck spots in a person’s body, by gently tugging on that fascial web - but I didn’t start out like that. Two years ago I only had a small slice of that sensory bandwidth.
Now I say the training process is kind of like weightlifting, where you know it’s possible to lift 100 or 200 pounds, because you see other people do it, but you picking up a weight for the first time will probably not do that. It takes some repetition, some showing up, some feeling whatever you feel even if it’s not what you expect or what I seem to be talking about, for you to train from A to B.

Examples of advanced tactile sensitivity

Ok, but if training tactile sensitivity is like weightlifting, what do the Olympic weightlifters look like?

For one, my clients are always so surprised that I touch them and they start dreaming. I almost take it for granted now. But I’m so, so glad to have this skill of altered-consciousness nervous system soothing via touch alone. I call it the “dream trance.” People emerge feeling renewed and more like themselves, and often there’s emotional catharsis. A client of mine put it as “woah, when you were working on my jaw, I had a memory come up of my dad yelling at me to be quiet - that seems like the kind of thing you could anonymize and use as evidence!”

So, my touch is emotionally precise. It’s also structurally precise, but, the way I kinesthetically navigate focuses so much on texture that I’m still developing language to talk about it. The subtypes of tension and qualitative ‘charge’ I focus on tend to color outside the lines of anatomical structures. However, when bodyworkers do specifically calibrate their work to correspond to western anatomy, results can be medical-grade.

My colleague Myles shares this story of how they worked with a client who thought they had carpal tunnel:

I had a patient come in a while ago complaining of "carpal tunnel" and acid reflux. In my examination, when I felt their wrists and hands, there wasn't any significant tension or patterns to clear. Their carpal tunnel had nerve tension, but I could feel it pulling from upstream. When I traced the tension upward, it brought me to their ribcage and torso, where I could feel a strong distortion through their stomach and esophagus.
The esophagus typically tethers to T2, so if there is tension in the stomach, it can create compression through the upper back/thoracic inlet which then created tension in their brachial plexus leading to a nerve sensation similar to carpal tunnel.
The lower esophageal sphincter was stuck open due to the tension pulling it up towards the head. When this sphincter is open, it lets the stomach acid travel upward and causes the burning sensation of heart burn.
When I released the upper esophagus and the adhesions between the stomach and diaphragm and chest wall, the whole stomach dropped and the lower esophageal sphincter closed and their acid reflux stopped almost instantly.
So, it wasn't actually carpal tunnel. It was a compression of the brachial plexus. It just felt like carpal tunnel, and also contributed to acid reflux.

Similarly, my early studies of organ-focused bodywork included this quote describing the skills of the founder, Jean-Pierre Barral:

Monique was asked to lie on her back on the treatment table fully clothed. Jean-Pierre Barral began moving his hands over her body in circles and short sweeps. His hands remained between 6 to 18 inches away from her body at all times, moving in and out between distances. Soon he began speaking under his breath softly and too himself. Within a minute or two he began speaking to the interpreter, who gave us a very accurate medical and surgical history of Monique. He spoke about the appendectomy at age 20, the two Caesarian sections in her later 20s and about her thyroid problem during one of her pregnancies. This was most remarkable in that the whole thing took just a few minutes and he never touched her. He did miss the fall on her back which fractured her sacrum when she was about 11 years of age. He knew something was wrong there but he did not know what it was. The problem that initially caught his attention was related to an improper healing subsequent to one of the Caesarian sections.
(VM1 course materials; they say they’re citing Your Inner Physician and You by John Upledger)

In the advanced bodywork classes I go to now, we discuss in granular detail the various arrangements of pleats that can happen in people’s joint capsules.

Drapery Pleat Styles and Custom Draperies Pleats — Imagine this except, it’s taking place in the collagenous-membraneous capsule fastened to bone on either end of your knee joint. That capsule contains the slippery synovial fluid of the joint :)

Again, my own work is only moderately anatomically oriented compared to what’s possible, but, I sure like going to these classes anyway! Here’s another story of mine, from one of them:

Hahahahaha this weekend I was in a class of advanced bodyworkers and during a trade, someone released a vascular heart strain pattern, in 15 seconds, that'd stumped two others for months. They were like "how'd you do that!!!" and she said "I just listened to it and did what it wanted."
This anecdote captures so much of the magic and the unique challenges of the bodywork profession. Everyone has a slightly different slice of sensory bandwidth available to them. A different tactile lens. And the putting words to that skill can be so elusive, but when the underlying skill works it's obvious.
The vascular heart strain pattern - was notable. The person who had it, who was himself an acupuncturist, was visibly flushed in the face for the next five minutes as his circulation adapted. Then he went home and slept well and had more energy the next day.
And - the two bodyworkers that were stumped on that pattern are well versed in "listening to the body and doing what it wants." That's what any bodyworker worth their salt does. But it's also so mysterious. So that explanation is the most hilarious thing she could've said.

And, here’s another story of my colleague Myles learning anatomically-oriented tactile sensitivity.

Q: “woah even you’re still feeling new things! how’d the rate of change go over time - slow down, stay constant, speed up?
A: “Oh, good question. The rate of change definitely tapered off for me after a point. Now it's more like fine tuning which frequencies I'm hearing instead of discovering whole radio stations. My very first class with my teacher was a MASSIVE download.
My issue has usually been that I get TOO much information and I don't know what to do with it or how to make sense of all of it. A lot of my journey has been learning to filter the information and only pickup what's relevant.
In the case of organ work, it felt like changing the glasses I'm wearing so that suddenly I can see things in more focus. “I'm touching someone's tight ribcage" became "I'm feeling the adhesions between the parietal and visceral pleura of the posterior lung"
Or "this person's trap is tight" became "I feel the tension in the vascular tree from the right subclavian artery causing tension in their trap.”
A big piece for me was letting my body take in the information and only letting the relevant pieces come to my conscious awareness.”

For an example of non-anatomical tactile sensitivity, here’s this story of me triaging anger in a client’s neck:

I get to the left side of her neck and the word "anger" flashes into my mind, along with somatic-imaginal senses of activation, buzzing, intensity, color. I've got both of my hands on her neck. Heat starts traveling up my left arm - from that spot on her neck. It makes it halfway up my left forearm. Ok that's pretty unignorable. So I ask her - "Hey, sometimes emotions can get stuck in people's muscles. If you sense into this spot, do you feel an emotional charge?" she says - "Oh absolutely. There's so much narrative. Anger. About a particular person." and she starts telling a story of a conflict she’s in.

And, I could go on and on and on. One of my teachers put his hand loosely on my right shoulder and detected vascular tension in my posterior intercostal arteries.

There are definitely health-supportive means of haptically interacting with nerves, bones, vasculature, lymph, and organs through bodywork. But, I’ll stop this post here for now! If you are curious to read more, here are some additional resources.